Catch Her If You Can (14 page)

I had their full attention now. Also that of the two technicians. One hung on his ladder, wires sprouting from both hands. The other had a boot planted on the bottom rung and his fascinated gaze locked on me.

“That’s one scenario we haven’t considered,” Paul admitted after a lengthy pause. “Where’s this device now?”

“In my office.”

“The office your ex-husband set on fire?”

I didn’t remember telling Donati about the fire, but at this point the days and the players were all starting to blur.

“Charlie didn’t spark much more than an electrical outage. And Snoopy didn’t sustain any damage.”

“Good.” He extracted a BlackBerry from his shirt pocket and paged down to his calendar. “How about I come out to Fort Bliss around ten thirty this morning and you show me how Snoopy works?”

“Not a problem. Do you want a demonstration, too, Mitch?”

“I do, but it’ll have to be some other time. I promised my boss I’d take patrol this morning.” He checked his watch. “I’d better hit the road. Before I leave, Paul, tell me how you’ll track Samantha.”

Donati waved a hand, deferring to the technical specialist with a fistful of wires.

“We’ve installed motion detectors here in the apartment,” the agent on the ladder informed both Mitch and me. “Also high-def video cameras with wireless transmitters. The parking area’s covered, too.”

“What about when she’s in transit?”

The tech climbed off the ladder and dug a small, flat object out of his bag of tricks.

“This sucker will pick up signals from Mars. All you have to do is keep it on your person, Lieutenant. We’ll track you street by street, block by block.”

He passed me the device, which was almost identical to the keypad for the Sebring’s door locks.

When I said as much to the tech, he nodded. “That’s the idea. Put it on your key ring so you have it with you wherever you go. If you’re in distress, just press this red button. It’ll set off a silent alarm that . . . No! Wait, Lieutenant!”

Too late. My thumb had already squished the button.

Muttering under his breath, the tech snatched a radio from his belt. “Comm, this is Strahan. Ignore distress signals emanating from tracking device Charlie Foxtrot Seven-Four-Four-Nine.”

“Charlie Foxtrot?”

I threw Donati an accusing glare. His smirk told he knew damned well those initials from the NATO phonetic alphabet conveyed several succinct messages, only one of which was politically correct.

“The alarm connects to our central control,” the tech informed me after his contact had reset the device. “We can relay the signal instantly to other local and regional law enforcement agencies and effect a response within minutes, much as we do for an AMBER Alert.”

I tried to convince myself an electronic leash made sense, especially with Mob bosses and/or Dutchmen out for my blood. Felt kind of odd being hooked into a system designed for kidnapped children, though.

“The Border Patrol’s plugged into the alert system, too,” Mitch advised. “I’ll make sure the people on our desk keep an eye on you.”

He checked his watch again.

“I’ve got to go. Call me when you leave work. I’ll bring a few things over and camp out here at your place till this is over. If that’s good with you?”

My toes did the curl thing again. “Very good.”

“I’ll see you after work, then. And for God’s sake, don’t try to be a hero. If anything looks or feels or sounds the least bit suspicious, press the panic button.”

“Don’t worry, I will.”

AND I would have. I swear!

The problem was that the FBI in all their brilliance made their handy-dandy panic device look
too
much like an ordinary keypad.

I discovered that when Paul Donati and the two technicians walked me to my car. By then I’d made a quick change into my uniform, clipped up my hair, slapped on some lip gloss, slung my purse over my shoulder, and grabbed my soft-sided briefcase. I kept my car keys in hand as I approached the Sebring but had to look twice to figure out which keypad popped the locks.

“Yours is square,” Paul pointed out with exaggerated patience. “Ours is oblong.”

I was tempted to respond with another string of letters from the NATO phonetic alphabet. Something along the lines of Bravo Foxtrot Delta. That’s BFD in non-NATO-ese. Nobly, I refrained.

Paul and company followed me until I exited I-10 for Patriot Freeway and the short stretch leading to Fort Bliss’s main entrance. With the post in sight, I decided it would be safe to make a quick stop at the donut shop in the strip mall just outside the gate.

I hit the place between waves of sweet-toothed military and civil service employees. Without the usual long line, I got in and out in mere minutes with a coffee to go and an assorted dozen. Included among the French crullers and cranberry muffins were three of Rocky’s favorite lemon-filled. I’m not ashamed to admit I intended them as a bribe. I hoped they would silence any possible objections to firing up Snoopy’s computers for an unscheduled, unofficial test.

True, this test had been requested by another government agency. Rocky and I had both taken some hits in the past on just this subject, however. The darts bounced off me but Dr. Balboa tends to internalize criticism. Actually, he internalizes everything and gets his feelings hurt in the process.

Rumor is he expressed those feelings very forcefully on at least one occasion, which resulted in his assignment to FST-3. I haven’t been able to substantiate the rumor, but I was thinking about a certain eyebrow-less scientist I’d bumped into at DARPA headquarters some months ago as I walked to my car.

I was halfway there when my cell phone sounded Mitch’s ring tone. I juggled coffee, donuts, and car keys to dig in my uniform pocket.

“You on base yet?” he wanted to know.

“Almost. I can see the front gate.”

“Don’t forget to call me when you leave work.”

“I won’t.”

“Good enough. I’ll see you . . .”

“I know,” I cut in with a smile. “When you see me.”

I was still smiling when a smoke black SUV with darkened windows cut across the parking lot and pulled up beside me. One glance at the driver sent my heart into my throat.

“Oh, hell!”

Pipe Guy was at the wheel. Someone wearing aviator glasses occupied the passenger seat. I tossed the coffee and donut box and fumbled frantically with my key ring, but Pipe Guy’s pal leaped out just as I stabbed the red button. The wrong red button, dammit. The Sebring’s horn started honking at the same instant Aviator Glasses reached over and stabbed
me
.

The needle was thin and sharp enough to pierce my supposedly heat-and-cold-resistant ABUs. I barely felt the pinprick, but whatever the bastard pumped into me worked fast. I managed one screech that even I couldn’t hear over the honking horn before my throat started to close.

My lips went numb. The keys slipped from my suddenly nerveless fingers. My knees buckled.

My last hope—my only hope!—was that the Sebring’s alarm had alerted folks inside the donut place. I couldn’t tell if it had. The SUV blocked my view of the shop windows.

A second later I couldn’t see anything at all.

 

I woke with the world’s worst case of cotton mouth.

My tongue felt ten times its normal size. My throat was bone dry. My salivary glands had gone on strike. My eyelids weren’t functioning properly, either, as I discovered when I tried to pry them open.

Nothing wrong with my hearing, however. A roar pierced the fog in my head. It was so loud and steady my confused brain soon identified it. That was an engine bouncing sound waves off my eardrums.

Correction. Two engines. I verified that when I finally forced my lids up over eyeballs that felt as pitted and rough as an unpaved road.

At that point I discovered I was flat on my back. In a small, prop aircraft. Minus the usual amenities like rear compartment seats. This one had been stripped and was obviously used primarily to haul cargo. I surmised as much from the tie-down straps dangling from the fuselage struts and the ringbolts welded to the flooring—one of which I was handcuffed to.

Frowning, I tugged on the cuff. The resulting rattle brought the two occupants of the open cockpit slewing around in their seats.

“About time you woke up,” a guy with mirrored sunglasses shouted over the engine’s whine. “We’re about to begin our descent.”

I recognized Pipe Guy’s pal behind the dark glasses. That wasn’t Pipe Guy in the pilot’s seat, though.

Swallowing in a desperate attempt to kick-start my salivary glands, I unstuck my tongue and forced out a hoarse croak. “Descent to where? Hey! You with the glasses! Where are we landing?”

He either didn’t hear or chose to ignore me. My money was on the latter. I swallowed once more and tried to clear the last fingers of the fog.

A weapon. I needed a weapon.

The cuffs rattled as I scooted around on the corregated decking. My dry throat closed again when I spotted a toolbox strapped down at the rear of the cargo compartment.

I shot a quick glance forward, saw the two men in the cockpit were otherwise engaged, and slithered across the deck like a python in tiger stripes.

Steel bit through the skin of my wrist. My elbow and shoulder joints screamed in protest. The toe of my boot angled toward the latch of the strap securing the toolbox. I couldn’t reach it.

I strained harder, biting my lip until I tasted blood, but couldn’t stretch that final inch. Even if I had, I wouldn’t have had time to get the box open before the aircraft banked sharply and began a steep descent.

Frustrated and aching and starting to get scared, I pushed into a sitting position. I was braced against the fuselage when we touched down. We taxied only a short distance before the pilot cut the engines.

Aviator Glasses unlatched his seat harness and came back to the rear compartment. Hunkering down, he slid his glasses to the tip of his nose and let his eyes drift from my bit lip to my bloody wrist. When they lifted and met mine, that wasn’t sympathy I saw in them.

“I’m going to unlock the cuff. Don’t try anything stupid, Lieutenant. I’ll put you out again at the first sign of trouble. Understood?”

I wanted to flip him the finger but settled for nodding.

“Just out of curiosity,” I rasped through my still-dry throat, “what did you inject me with?”

“The same paralyzing agent used in hospitals and ERs to relax muscles and put patients out before they insert breathing tubes and stuff. Not a problem unless you’re allergic to it.”

“How . . . ?” I had to stop and lick my lips again. “How did you know I wasn’t?”

“I didn’t.”

The response chilled me almost as much as his careless shrug. It also told me the odds were pretty high that I wouldn’t leave wherever I was alive.

I tried to shake off the terror that thought generated as Sunglasses released the cuff attached to the ringbolt. Yanking my arm forward, he snapped the cuff on my other wrist, then hooked a hand under my armpit and hauled me to my feet.

“Let’s go.”

“Go where?” I rasped as he shoved me toward the steps the pilot had let down.

“You’ll know soon enough.”

I stumbled down the steps into sunshine so dazzling I had to squeeze my eyes against the glare. It gradually reduced enough for me to spot a Hummer waiting with the engine idling . . . and what looked like a sheer, thousand-foot drop beyond it.

I staggered back, glancing wildly from right to left. My stunned mind took several seconds to grasp the fact that we’d touched down atop a massive plateau jutting out of the empty desert. Pen would object to that characterization, I thought, gulping back a bubble of near hysteria. As she reminds us ad nauseam, the desert is anything but empty.

This one showed no signs of human habitation, though. No baked adobe-brick farmhouse. No fence lines. No slowly twisting windmill pumping precious water into tin cattle troughs.

Where the hell was I? New Mexico? Arizona? Somewhere south of the border? Nothing in the austerely magnificent landscape gave me a clue. The driver of the Hummer, the two pilots, and I could have been alone in the universe.

My eerie sense of isolation lasted only until Aviator Glasses manhandled me into the backseat of the Hummer and climbed in beside me. The driver gave me a curious glance in the rearview mirror, but I didn’t see anything remotely resembling sympathy in his dark eyes as he put the heavy wheeler in gear and pulled away from the dirt airstrip. Only after we’d bumped and humped for a good half mile across the top of the mesa did I see the walled compound.

It was flat-roofed and two-tiered, with the ends of massive lodgepole pines butting through the walls at regular intervals. The construction reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the ancient Anasazi pueblos. But the security cameras and sensors that monitored our approach were ultra high-tech and
very
twenty-first century. So was the Uzi cradled in the arm of the guard who waved us through a wrought-iron gate.